May 16, 2011

Healthcare in the Cloud: Not Going Away Ever!

Every day I experience life in the world of healthcare IT, supporting 3000 doctors, 18000 faculty, and 3 million patients. In this blog I record my experiences with infrastructure, applications, policies, management, and governance as well as muse on such topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, standardizing data in healthcare, and living life to its fullest.

Dr. Halamka presents a good argument for why the Cloud is here to stay in the healthcare industry. However, the best argument is that internal architectures within healthcare organizations experience far worse uptime then what the Big Cloud Vendors provide.

How often does MS Exchange go down on a yearly basis? That is simply one of many mission critical apps that healthcare organizations usually have to contend with. Internal IT staff are overwhelmed and simply do not have the resources to compete with vendors that are "betting the farm" on uptime.

We use Google Apps for several businesses and it has been down a couple of hours over the last three years. I can live with that. When Google Apps goes down you can bet that the world knows about it and Google is doing everything it can to recover as quickly as possible. Most small businesses rely on "Joe tech support" from down the street. Now Joe may be an awesome IT geek but what if he goes on vacation, or his wife has a baby, or whatever?

The Cloud will eventually approach the reliability of the electric grid. It will go down from time to time but no business today would argue that they should be generating their own electricity.